On Friday 4 December 2015, The Bookseller, the UK and Ireland’s primary source of news for all things publishing related, hosted the FutureBook Conference 2015. The conference took place in The Mermaid Theatre in London, and a stellar line-up of the great and the good in the book world gave us their thoughts on the current state of – and future possibilities for – book publishing.
Speakers included Susan Jurevics, CEO of Pottermore, the online world created by JK Rowling to host the digital editions of her reasonably well-known series of books. They also included Michael Tamblyn, CEO of Kobo, the cool and feisty rival to Amazon Kindle, which began life as a small Canadian enterprise before rising to become one of the big five channels for ebooks globally. You can hear his talk here.
The day, which included a host of short talks and panel discussions on nearly every aspect of the book world, was closed out by the looming figure of Charlie Redmayne, CEO of Harper Collins UK. Redmayne warned us all about the perils of cyber crime, and the very real risk of what happened to Sony Pictures coming to a publishing house near you. In other words, be careful what you say to your editor, and vice versa.
The highlight of the day, however, didn’t come from a publisher, an editor, or a CEO. It came from a singer and self-published author, called Akala. If you don’t know Akala, take any opportunity you can to see him perform. There are not too many presentations that finish up with an epic poem set to music about the fall of Empire. Hardly any at all, in fact. And it was incredible.
In the run-up to the Future Book conference, however, The Bookseller ran a series called The Publishing Manifestos, through which a variety of people from different sides of the trade gave their take on where we are, and where we might get to. Carrowmore was lucky enough to be included in this, and you can read our very small contribution here.